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A certain Material Girl is still a Jimmy Kimmel Live! virgin, and the late-night host is holding out hope to have Madonna on his show for the very first time. In a new interview with People, the comedian revealed which A-list celebrity he most wants to have as a guest on his show, despite never […]

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Source: Genaro Molina / Getty
ASAP Relli’s response to the verdict of his ex-friend, ASAP Rocky, being declared not guilty seems to reveal his ongoing frustration with both the legal situation and the fallout from his fractured relationship with the ASAP Mob.

In his online post, Relli expressed a sense of indifference toward the opinions of those who have criticized him, including Rocky and the rest of the crew. He framed gossip as a form of escapism for people without meaningful goals, suggesting that those who engage in such behavior are wasting their lives. Relli’s message was clear: no matter the accusations or personal attacks against him, he no longer cares about how others view him or the damage to his reputation.

His words might stem from the intense scrutiny he has faced, with accusations of being a “rat” and a “snitch” following his role in the legal case. These labels likely hurt Relli, pushing him to lash out and make it clear that he’s moving past the drama, regardless of what others say. His declaration that others’ negativity doesn’t add value to his life signifies a rejection of the toxic environment he once shared with Rocky and the ASAP Mob. It’s a bold statement of independence, showing that Relli is choosing to focus on his own life, unburdened by the opinions and judgments of those who have turned against him.

Billy McFarland‘s against-all-odds comeback festival has an official ticketing partner, location and new date, but skeptics still have plenty of reasons to doubt the convicted fraudster’s claims that Fyre Fest 2 won’t be a repeat of his 2017 disaster in the Bahamas.
On Monday (Feb. 24), Austin-based secondary ticketing site soldout.com announced an exclusive ticketing partnership with Fyre Festival 2, which the release announced was to be held on Isla Mujeres in Mexico from May 30 to June 2, 2025 (roughly a month later than the previously-announced dates of April 25-28). Isla Mujeres is a popular tourist destination in the Caribbean Sea about a 30-minute ferry ride from Cancun, located in the state of Quintana Roo.

Tickets for Fyre Fest 2 start at $1,400 a piece for a four-day pass (airfare and hotel not included) and go as high as $25,000 for artist passes that include backstage access and overnight stays at one of two high-end hotels on the island. There’s even a $1 million package for eight people that McFarland says includes access to luxury villas, a private marina with high-end yachts and a private jet to and from Cancun.

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Fyre is handling the primary sale of tickets through its own internal system and is utilizing soldout.com for secondary sales. On its website, soldout.com guarantees fans a 100% refund of their money if an event is canceled and not rescheduled. Notably, fans seeking a refund for the 2017 festival received pennies on the dollar due to the festival’s bankruptcy.

Andrew Hentrich, president of Soldout.com, affirms that his company does guarantee refunds if the fest is canceled, noting that “all proceeds from Fyre Festival ticket sales on SoldOut.com are held securely and will not be settled with Fyre until after the event has successfully taken place. Additionally, SoldOut.com is fully insured and financially equipped to issue refunds if necessary, ensuring buyers are protected in the event of cancellation or significant changes to the festival date. This policy applies to all events listed on SoldOut.com, not just Fyre Festival.”

McFarland has been teasing Fyre Festival 2 as a redemption project and personal rebrand since being released from prison and into a halfway house in May 2022. McFarland served four years of his six-year sentence after admitting to defrauding investors in the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival, which was promised as a luxury destination music event via extravagant promotion from A-list celebrity influencers. But when ticketholders showed up on Great Exuma island in The Bahamas, they found the event they were promised was totally unrealized. McFarland also pleaded guilty to charges in a later ticket-selling scam.

McFarland promises Fyre Festival 2 will be different, and nailing down a location and locking in a date for the festival are major milestones. A press release also announced that Mexican concert production company LostNights would handle festival logistics.

“FYRE Festival 2 is about the adventure into the unknown, curating elite, once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” McFarland said in a statement. “Soldout.com’s background in the music festival world will ensure that our guests have a seamless ticket-buying process from start to finish. Soldout.com is a great addition to the team which also includes Lostnights, our talented and accomplished festival producer and operator.”

The next step will be securing talent for the festival. Billboard reached out to two of the largest booking agencies for music festivals and both said no one has contacted them from Fyre Festival or LostNights to book musical talent.

Disturbed is walking down memory lane and starting a new era at the same time.
The Chicago-formed heavy rock quartet kicks off The Sickness 25th Anniversary Tour on Tuesday (Feb. 25) in Nampa, Idaho, celebrating its five-times platinum debut album, which spent 106 weeks on the Billboard 200. Meanwhile, it’s just released “I Will Not Break,” a characteristically defiant track that is the first taste of Disturbed’s ninth studio album, which will be followed by additional singles before the full-length’s release — most likely in 2026, according to frontman David Draiman.

“We’re going to release track by track over a set course of time,” Draiman, who now resides in Miami, tells Billboard. “We have so many strong songs in this collection of material, so many single contenders, we’re just gonna push ’em out bit by bit. Every musician is most in love with their newest creation, but this body of work was so inspiring it made us want to change our strategy. We have some incredible surprises, too — not all meat and potatoes, stereotypical Disturbed, either, definitely a lot of left turns for us. We’ll see when those actually get to see the light of day. We can’t wait for all of it to be out.”

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Guitarist Dan Donegan feels the same way, describing what’s coming as “a well-rounded body of work. There’s some interesting stuff in there, some really great ideas, some very cool moments. It’s a good blend of everything that’s become Disturbed — some of those old-school moments, those animalistic moments. We’re always gonna have those big, melodic moments with David to showcase showcase some of his vocal jobs, some great, heavy riffs — some of my favorite riffs I’ve written so far. I think fans will be pleased.”

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The heavy-hitting (and certainly familiar-sounding) “I Will Not Break” makes its intent clear with its title. Draiman — whose vocal follows a minute and 16 seconds of hard grooving by Donegan, drummer Mike Wrengren and bassist John Moyer — says it was inspired by “the darkness that I had to go through during the last touring cycle,” which included a 2023 divorce and learning to single-parent his son, as well as aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the rising antisemitism he saw surfacing around the world.

“It’s definitely a song I think is very needed right now — definitely I needed it,” Draiman explains. “It’s an empowerment tune. It’s about overcoming adversity. It’s about coming out the other side of the darkness, about not letting the pressures that mount in your life break you.” He adds that the song — produced by Drew “WZRD BLD” Fulk (Lil Wayne, Knocked Loose, NLE Choppa), who helmed 2022’s Divisive — was one of the last to surface in the process.

“We were definitely in a stride of sorts, and definitely feeling it,” Draiman says. “I said to the guys, ‘Give me something, give me an idea that has the old school, head-bobbing feel, that familiar rhythm that I can get really syncopated with and do what they do. So they gave me that. Too easy.”

While fans wait for more new tracks and the eventual album, Disturbed will deliver a 25th anniversary edition of The Sickness on March 7, adding B-sides, demos and previously unreleased songs to flesh out the package, which housed the No. 5-peaking Mainstream Rock Airplay hit “Down With the Sickness” and the Alternative Airplay top 10 “Stupify.”

For the tour, Disturbed will be playing The Sickness, which was produced by Johnny K, in its entirety and in sequence, which Draiman describes as “weird” since those hits, usually saved for the end of the night, will come significantly earlier. “We’ve never done anything like this. I think it’s going to be really cool,” Donegan adds. “It’s our biggest album and our big debut, so we want to honor it from start to finish, playing some of these songs we haven’t played in a long time, and then have a second set of things we did after that.”

Disturbed has plenty to draw from there as well, with 27 top 10 Mainstream Rock Airplay hits — a dozen of which hit No. 1, including remakes of Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” All told Disturbed has scored five platinum-or-better albums.

“I remember when we were playing local, before we were touring outside of Chicago, we used to say, ‘I hope we get to the point where we can fill the Riviera Theatres of the world’;…maybe 2,000 seats,” Draiman recalls. “Now we’re playing arenas and packing them with 10, 15, 20,000 at a time. It’s very surreal. It never loses its luster, and it’s still amazing to experience the nice, steady, gradual ascent we’ve been able to have over the course of our career.”

Donegan’s take is that Disturbed “weren’t reinventing the wheel, but we weren’t trying to emulate a certain band, either. We just took all our influences and improvised and wrote the songs, and it started becoming something. But we weren’t chasing anything else; we were just writing the music that we wanted to write.”

The guitarist considers “Down With the Sickness” illustrative of that philosophy. “We were just going into the rehearsal room in the late ‘90s, jumping on our instruments and warming up,” Donegan remembers. “Mikey did this tribal beat…it was never intended for anything, just warming up, and I said, ‘Keep doing that for a minute’ and just started improvising the riff and developing it. David’s listening to what we’re doing and we put that little pause in it, before it kicks in heavier, and out of nowhere in the break he does the signature ‘wa-ka-ka-ka!’ thing and we’re looking at him going, ‘What the hell…?!’ It was just an instinct, just a reaction to this tribal beat and the riff. We were taken aback by it; we didn’t know if he was gonna turn it into words or what, but it just kinda stuck. We were trying to find our own identity…and that definitely helped.”

For The Sickness 25th Anniversary Tour Disturbed is also putting together a museum of sorts for VIP package buyers, including instruments and stage outfits, concert posters and vintage t-shirts and merchandise. The group has also announced a European leg of the trek with 17 dates kicking off Sept. 29 in Copenhagen. For Draiman, Donegan and their bandmates, the nostalgic dip has been an invigorating reminder of where the band came from as well as jet fuel for its future plans.

“I just love the fact we’re still hungry,” Donegan says. “We’ve bene very blessed and fortunate to check off bucket list items. We’ve played with pretty much all our heroes — Metallica, Judas Priest, Pantera, Queensrÿche, all these classic rock/metal bands we’ve grown up to. We just played with Iron Maiden in Mexico City in November; that was a huge bucket list show for us. And there’s been a lot of bucket list venues. And we still love doing it. There’s an incredible addiction to performing, to being on stage and that interaction with the crowd, to going into the studio and making new music, all of it.”

Draiman will check off another item of his own on July 5, when he’ll be part of the Back To The Beginning concert in Birmingham, England, where Ozzy Osbourne and the original lineup of Black Sabbath will play its final show supported by a who’s-who list of heavy metal and hard rock acts. “I’m elated to be part of it, humbled and honored,” he says, noting Disturbed’s appearances on Ozzfest tours helped break the band. “It’s the most seminal frontman and band for hard rock and heavy metal; the second record I ever bought, right after Kiss Destroyer, was (Sabbath’s) We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘n’ Roll. I love Ozzy. I love the Osbourne family. They’ve been so supportive, such a huge part of we’ve become who we’ve become. We could not have done it without them, so I’m intensely grateful. We all are. I hope that I can just do my little part to pay tribute to their legacy.”

The Sickness 25th Anniversary Tour North American itinerary includes:Feb 25 Nampa, ID Ford Idaho Center Arena*Feb 27 Denver, CO Ball Arena*Mar 02 St. Louis, MO Enterprise Center*Mar 04 Milwaukee, WI Fiserv Forum*Mar 06 Minneapolis, MN Target Center*Mar 08 Chicago, IL United Center*Mar 10 Detroit, MI Little Caesars Arena*Mar 12 Louisville, KY KFC Yum! Center*Mar 14 Boston, MA TD Garden*Mar 17 Washington, D.C. Capital One Arena*Mar 19 Montreal, QC Centre Bell*Mar 21 New York, NY Madison Square Garden*Mar 29 Cincinnati, OH Heritage Bank Center^Mar 31 Cleveland, OH Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse^Apr 02 Philadelphia, PA Wells Fargo Center^Apr 04 Buffalo, NY KeyBank Center^Apr 05 Pittsburgh, PA PPG Paints Arena^Apr 07 Toronto, ON Scotiabank Arena^Apr 09 Indianapolis, IN Gainbridge Fieldhouse^Apr 12 Charlotte, NC Spectrum Center^Apr 14 Raleigh, NC Lenovo Center^Apr 16 Birmingham, AL Legacy Arena at The BJCC^Apr 18 Sunrise, FL Amerant Bank Arena^Apr 23 Duluth, GA Gas South Arena^Apr 25 San Antonio, TX Frost Bank Center^Apr 26 Fort Worth, TX Dickies Arena^Apr 28 Oklahoma City, OK Paycom Center^May 05 Seattle, WA Climate Pledge Arena^May 07 Portland, OR Moda Center^May 09 Sacramento, CA Golden 1 Center^May 10 San Francisco, CA Chase Center^May 13 Inglewood, CA Kia Forum^May 15 Phoenix, AZ Footprint Center^May 17 Las Vegas, NV MGM Grand Garden Arena^*with special guests Three Days Grace and opener Sevendust^with special guests Daughtry and opener Nothing More

Drake and producer Elkan are giving fans a glimpse of how one of the standout tracks on $ome $exy $ongs 4 U came together. Reposted from Elkan’s Instagram, Drake shared a video on his plottttwistttttt IG account of the producer crafting the beat to “Nokia” in a studio in Freetown, Sierra Leone, timestamped on Wednesday, […]

Halsey has yet another trick up their sleeves. The star revealed on Monday (Feb. 24) that she’s releasing a brand new single, titled “Safeword,” on Thursday (Feb. 27).

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To tease the single, Halsey dropped a 13-second preview into the upcoming music video, in which they’re seen rocking black-and-silver studded underwear, a leather jacket and knee-high, stiletto, studded boots. While a guitar-driven beat plays, a man is seen laying on the floor, wearing a leather submission mask. Halsey, the dominatrix, has her foot on his throat before the scene cuts to the singer’s face, exclaiming, “You’re not the boss of me!”

“Safeword” comes just a few months after Halsey dropped their highly anticipated fifth studio album, The Great Impersonator, back in October, featuring singles like “The End,” “Lucky,” “Lonely Is the Muse” and “Ego.”

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Additionally, the superstar is set to embark on her Halsey: For My Last Trick tour this spring. The 32-city Live Nation-promoted outing is slated to kick off on May 10 at the Toyota Pavilion at Concord in Concord, CA and criss-cross the country for shows in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Dallas, Nashville, Tampa, Charlotte, Toronto, Chicago and St. Louis, before winding down on July 6 at the Yaamava’ Theater in Highland, CA. Del Water Gap, The Warning, Evanescence, Alvvays, Hope Tala, Royel Otis, Sir Chloe, flowerlove, Magdalena Bay and Alemeda are all joining joining on select dates. 

See the full list of tour dates here.

Chino Moreno is ready to embark on a new arenas tour with his alternative metal band Deftones, starting Tuesday (Feb. 25) at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. It’s the California band’s first tour since 2022, and it will share the stage with The Mars Volta and Fleshwater during some spring dates in the U.S.

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At the same time, the Sacramento-based band plans to release new music this year, Moreno tells Billboard Español in Mexico City. “So the plan is, obviously, to have a record sometime around that time [during the tour.] It’s getting very close to being ready, so yeah, we’re excited,” he says of what would be the successor to Ohms (2020).

Almost eight years have passed since Deftones last visited Mexico, where — as in the rest of Latin America — it has a solid fan base. But with his other project, Crosses, Moreno was in Mexico City last December. Here, he and his bandmate, guitarist and producer Shaun Lopez, closed the tour of their album Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete (2023) at the Pabellón Oeste of the Palacio de los Deportes, after being on the road between 2023 and 2024.

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“We made it happen! We were gonna do a full Latin America tour, but it was just gonna be too much time and it was close to the holidays, so we decided we at least have to go to Mexico City,” Moreno says.

It was Crosses’ first show in the capital and it was an incredible experience for him and Lopez, who had never been here before. Lopez, a former member of the now-defunct group Far, created an unexpected close bond with Mexico when he served as a producer of Mexican trio The Warning‘s album Keep Me Fed (2024) — it was thanks to the Villarreal Vélez sisters that the musician obtained his first Latin Grammy nomination last year, for best rock song, as co-author of their song “Qué Más Quieres.”

“When we wrote it, it wasn’t in Spanish,” Lopez tells Billboard Español. “Sometimes when you do songwriting sessions like that, you don’t hear anything for like a year. And usually when you don’t hear anything, you think ‘Oh, they didn’t like it, they didn’t like me’ or whatever, you know? And then the manager hit me up a year later and he said: ‘Can you send me a session for that song?’ He’s like, ‘The good news is the girls are going to convert it to Spanish, which is going to be actually really cool because it’ll be the only song on the album that’s Spanish.’”

In 2025, Moreno will spend much of the year touring with Deftones, so Crosses will have to take a break before returning to the recording studio. “I don’t know how soon it’ll be, but we definitely want to work on more music,” Lopez says. “We enjoy making it and yeah, I just would like to thank everybody for showing interest in our project.”

As Deftones is soon expected to announce tour dates in Mexico, Moreno confirms that the band is considering the possibility of bringing the festival they have been organizing annually since 2020 in San Diego, California — Día de los Deftones, whose name is a clear reference to the popular Mexican tradition Día de Muertos celebrated on Nov. 1-2 — to Mexico.

“We talked about it a lot recently, so it’s definitely in discussions to do so. We would love to do!” Moreno says. “I mean, I can’t promise, but, you know, it’s been growing really great.”

Lizzo is on the hunt for authenticity going into her next era, with the hitmaker dropping a new music teaser for a project titled “Love in Real Life” on Monday (Feb. 24). A cinematic clip on Lizzo’s Instagram opens with a bird’s-eye view of the Grammy winner lying on the hood of a vintage white […]

Calibre 50 adds a record-extending 27th No. 1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican Airplay chart with “El Sueño Americano.” The Sinaloans achieve the feat on the March 1-dated tally, as the song advances 2-1 for its first week on top. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “El Sueño […]

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Source: Arturo Holmes / Getty / Joy Reid
Joy Reid will host her final show on MSNBC this week, and many folks are understandably BIG MAD about that.
Joy Reid has lost her evening news show as part of a lineup shakeup at MSNBC spearheaded by Rebecca Kutler, the network’s new president.
Sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that Kutler plans to replace The ReidOut, which has been on the air at 7 pm since 2020, with co-hosts from The Weekend: Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez.

The Weekend has recently enjoyed success with a 35% increase in viewership during its 8 am time slot on Saturday and Sunday.
Before landing The ReidOut, Reid hosted a weekend show, AM Joy, from 2016 to 2020.
While fighting back tears, Reid talked about her shows canceling during a Zoom call on Sunday’s edition of the Win With Black Women, where she doubled down on her work and topics like Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Gaza that “she went hard on.”
Mediate reports that over 10,000 people joined the call.
Per Mediate:
Where I land is that the moment that I’ve– of guilt that I felt that I went hard on so many issues–.
Whether it was the Black Lives Matter issues of a young baby or a mom or dad that was killed, or when we opened up people’s eyes to the fact that Asian Americans were being targeted and not just Black folks.
That– or went hard for immigrants who’ve done nothing but come to this country like my parents did and try to make a life and defended them.
Or whether we’ve talked about what the president is doing that is subversive to the Constitution, that is injurious to our liberty, you know, defending books that people find inconvenient, you know, that Nikole Hannah-Jones put into our spirit that we need to understand 1619 as the real founding of this country.
Whether it’s talking about any of these issues and, yes, whether it’s talking about Gaza and the fact that we as the American people have a right to object, to have a right to object to little babies being bombed.
And and where I come down on that is I’m not sorry. I am not sorry that I stood up for those those things because those things are of God.
https://x.com/tommyxtopher/status/1894102834800435435
Joy Reid Was Not The Only Anchor Affected
Reid’s show wasn’t the only casualty. The Daily Beast reports that anchors Jonathan Capehart, Katie Phang, and Ayman Mohyeldin are also losing their shows.
According to the website, Capehart and Mohyeldin will host separate editions of The Weekend at 7 am and 6 pm Phang will stay on as a legal correspondent but will no longer have an anchor slot.

Miami-based anchor José Díaz-Balart is also losing his show, but he will stay as a weekend host of NBC’s Nightly News.
Social Media Reacts
Reactions to Reid’s apparent “firing” aren’t sitting well with folks. Some are even calling Kuttler’s plans racist, mainly because everyone involved in the shakeup is people of color.
https://x.com/notcapnamerica/status/1894088735265886333
Others are using the moment to give Joy Reid her flowers and providing them a platform to give their thoughts on the political climate when other networks didn’t.
“I owe the television part of my career to Joy Reid, as do so many other Black voices y’all never would have heard of if not for her. And *that’s* why she’s gone. They can treat black folks as interchangeable, but everybody Black knows that Joy was indispensable,” Ellie Mystal wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
 Yes, Reid’s MSNBC cameras are turning off, but we are sure the haters will never silence her voice. 
You can see more reactions in the gallery below.